SEO Common Mistakes for Ecommerce Sites – and how to fix

UK eCommerce Case Study On Flaws – I discovered this website in 2018 and it’s now 2019 at the time of writing this blog. Here I pick through the faults of this website and demonstrate the common mistakes that eCommerce business owners make.

Why Is My Ecommerce Website Not Ranking?

How Many SEO Errors Are You Guilty Of?

However, Google is ranking your homepage for the 4 words ‘welcome to my website’ which is totally irrelevant if you are selling leather goods isn’t it?

Common Category Landing Page SEO Errors – Continued

BRAND NAME – If people Google search your brand name, the likelyhood is that you’re going to be Google page 1, position 1 – correct? The point of SEO is to bring people to your website who are not aware of your brand. People that are searching for Leather Wallets, Purses etc so having your brand name as the H1 Header on your home page is poor for SEO.

Rename your categories with your keyword, in this case ‘leather’

Common Category Landing Page SEO Errors

Total lack of content, poor meta titles and zero meta descriptions. From a marketing perspective having the meta login for WordPress on the right hand menu does not look professional on https://www.[DOMAIN].co.uk/brands/

Pages such as https://www.[DOMAIN].co.uk/wallets/ have a lack of textual content and no images.

Non SEO friendly SEO URLs e.g. https://www.[DOMAIN].co.uk/product/fulton-bees-tiny/ – where is the keyword ‘Umbrella’ in the URL? Google does not know that bees-tiny is an umbrella.

The image of this product https://www.[DOMAIN].co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/I_274413683_01_20170812.jpeg is not SEO friendly, the Alt tag should be keyword rich.

On Page SEO Content and Critical Importance

Attention all eCommerce website owners – Google does not read images, so by just displaying images of your stock items without text means that your page is invisible to Google.

This Website Has Zero Textual Content selling luxury items at £400

Textual Content Case Study – Ranking Before and After Adding Text

Read my SEO Lady Case Study – Google page 1 results that you can check online today to verify that the websites are still ranking in Google from work carried out back in 2016 and they are still ranking today.

What Content Do I need To Write?

The good news is that if you have a WordPress, Shopify or Magento website then that’s perfect for SEO.
The bad news is that your website desperately needs written content on the home page and landing category pages (including your keywords!) as you may have **zero**

Google indicates 350 words MINIMUM for the home page and 250 words MINIMUM for each landing page so you’ve got to invest time in your website like your competitors have.

Would you be writing the content?

Do you need to pay someone to write content?

Skyscraper Content of 1,000 words or more is excellent Google food

Would you be able to write more than the minimum number of words per page and produce Skyscraper Content?

There Are No Quick Wins Or Shortcuts

Trust me, on-page content is favoured more than 500 backlinks you have purchased from an online seller.

Which underrated SEO tactic do I wish people would focus on?

Content and Alt tags on images.

Improving content quality and quantity of words, as opposed to building backlinks. Taking the time to write skyscraper content and renaming images from stock titles (CAMERA DC009833 for example) to include your keywords / services / items / geographical areas.

Renaming your images and uploading to your website adding an ALT tag on every single image. Yes, it’s tedious, but how else do image-led websites rank in Google? Any photography website is usually guilty of not adding text and instead using images to show off their skills. As previously mentioned, images are invisible to Google.

How To Create A Page or Blog Post That Grabs Google’s Attention to Rank

1 – Before you start to write, decide what phrase you want to target and keyword order (most important first)

2 – Your home page should have 300-400 words MINIMUM more if possible, you can split the content into 2 blocks. Google takes more notice of text when it’s towards the top of the page instead of an afterthought and slapping it at the bottom of the page. All category/blog/landing pages should have 250-350 words MINIMUM, again write 500-1,000 words if you can.

3 – URL / Page Title / H1 header should have keywords first as Google views the keywords at the beginning of the Title Tag and Header as the most important. Remember not to include your brand name as it’s irrelevant. Avoid using your brand name – the point of SEO is to attract people to your site who don’t know your company. If they do know your brand they will find you anyway.

The page title – and the URL www.seolady.co.uk/small-business-seo/seo-training-somerset. This is referred to as an SEO-friendly URL with the most important keywords first

Best practises say your Meta Title should be 70 characters or less in length

Your H1 Heading should be no longer than 70 characters in length
Your meta description is between 150 and 160 characters in length for optimal SERPs and should be written in a sales and enticing manner

A headline and sub headers – H1, H2, and more

Use Alt tags on images – Alt tags should have keywords first and brand name last – in order of importance

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